New Hard Drives to Leave XP Behind

Hard drive manufacturers are about to change the format on new hard drive which will prevent older operating systems (such as Windows XP) from working. The new controller technology is increasing the byte sector size from what it is now (512 bytes) to somewhere in the region of 4K to allow the data that we currently have to day to work better.

The problem will only become apparent if you want to install Windows XP on a new hard drive. At this point it simply wont work.

The new hard drives are supposed to start being launched in 2011 at which point, you won’t be required to switch over as your XP machine will continue to work as normal… that is until the drive fails and you end up having to buy a new drive.

The reason for the shift is that large hard drives (such as 1TB or 2TB models) still use the 512 byte sectors. As a 1TB drive has to pack in a few million of these sectors a lot of wasted space happens due to each sector having bytes before and after it to let the computer know where each sector is. By increasing the size of the sectors to 4k this will essentially cut down about 7/8ths of the wasted space on a drive as well as keep data clustered far better making drives perform better.

All is not lost though if you must keep Windows XP as the new drives (for a time) will be backwards compatible so to speak in that the 4K sectors through emulation although there will be noticeable slowdown in doing this.

Via: BBC News